Proteins and peptides are polymers of amino acids that have a wide variety of uses. Peptides are characteristically distinguished from proteins by their smaller size and their lack of tertiary structure needed for complex functionality, such as enzymatic activity. Synthetic peptides that can be designed to exhibit desirable and valuable characteristics have been developed for a variety of purposes.
The efficient production of bioactive proteins and peptides has become a hallmark of the biomedical and industrial biochemical industry. Bioactive peptides and proteins are used as curative agents in a variety of diseases such as diabetes (insulin), viral infections and leukemia (interferon), diseases of the immune system (interleukins), and red blood cell deficiencies (erythropoietin) to name a few. Additionally, large quantities of proteins and peptides are needed for various industrial applications including, for example, the pulp and paper and pulp industries, textiles, food industries, sugar refining, wastewater treatment, production of alcoholic beverages and as catalysts for the generation of new pharmaceuticals.
With the advent of the discovery and implementation of combinatorial peptide screening technologies such as bacterial display (Kemp, D. J.; Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 78(7): 4520-4524 (1981); yeast display (Chien et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 88(21): 9578-82 (1991)), combinatorial solid phase peptide synthesis (U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,449,754; 5,480,971; 5,585,275 and 5,639,603), phage display technology (U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,223,409; 5,403,484; 5,571,698; and 5,837,500), ribosome display (U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,643,768; 5,658,754; and 7,074,557), and mRNA display technology (PROFUSION™; U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,258,558; 6,518,018; 6,281,344; 6,214,553; 6,261,804; 6,207,446; 6,846,655; 6,312,927; 6,602,685; 6,416,950; 6,429,300; 7,078,197; and 6,436,665) new applications for peptides having specific binding affinities have been developed. In particular, peptides are being looked to as linkers in biomedical fields for the attachment of diagnostic and pharmaceutical agents to surfaces (see Grinstaff et al, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0185870 and Linter in U.S. Pat. No. 6,620,419), as well as in the personal care industry for the attachment of benefit agents to body surfaces such as hair and skin (see commonly owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/935,642, and Janssen et al. U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0152976), and in the printing industry for the attachment of pigments to print media (see commonly owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/935,254).
In some cases commercially useful proteins and peptides may be synthetically generated or isolated from natural sources. However, these methods are often expensive, time consuming and characterized by limited production capacity. The preferred method of protein and peptide production is through the fermentation of recombinantly constructed organisms, engineered to over-express the protein or peptide of interest. Although preferable to synthesis or isolation, recombinant expression of peptides has a number of obstacles to be overcome in order to be a cost-effective means of production. For example, peptides (and in particular short peptides) produced in a cellular environment are often soluble and susceptible to degradation from the action of native cellular proteases. Purification can be difficult, resulting in poor yields depending on the nature of the protein or peptide of interest.
One means to mitigate the above difficulties is the use the genetic chimera for protein and peptide expression. A chimeric protein or “fusion protein” is a polypeptide comprising at least one portion of the desired protein product fused to at least one portion comprising a peptide tag. The peptide tag may be used to assist protein folding, assist post expression purification, protect the protein from the action of degradative enzymes, and/or assist the protein in passing through the cell membrane.
In many cases it is useful to express a protein or peptide in insoluble form, particularly when the peptide of interest is rather short, substantially soluble, and subject to proteolytic degradation within the host cell. Production of the peptide in insoluble form both facilitates simple recovery and protects the peptide from the undesirable proteolytic degradation. One means to produce the peptide in insoluble form is to recombinantly produce the peptide of interest in the form of an insoluble fusion protein by including within the fusion construct at least one solubility tag (i.e., an inclusion body tag) that promotes inclusion body formation. Typically, the fusion protein is also designed to include at least one cleavable peptide linker so that the peptide of interest can be subsequently recovered from the fusion protein. The fusion protein may be designed to include a plurality of inclusion body tags, cleavable peptide linkers, and regions encoding the peptide of interest.
Fusion proteins comprising a peptide tag that facilitate the expression of insoluble proteins are well known in the art. Typically, the tag portion of the chimeric or fusion protein is large, increasing the likelihood that the fusion protein will be insoluble. Example of large peptide tags typically used include, but are not limited to chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (Dykes et al., Eur. J. Biochem., 174:411 (1988), β-galactosidase (Schellenberger et al., Int. J. Peptide Protein Res., 41:326 (1993); Shen et al., Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 281:4627 (1984); and Kempe et al., Gene, 39:239 (1985)), glutathione-S-transferase (Ray et al., Bio/Technology, 11:64 (1993) and Hancock et al. (WO94/04688)), the N-terminus of L-ribulokinase (U.S. Pat. No. 5,206,154 and Lai et al., Antimicrob. Agents & Chemo., 37:1614 (1993), bacteriophage T4 gp55 protein (Gramm et al., Bio/Technology, 12:1017 (1994), bacterial ketosteroid isomerase protein (Kuliopulos et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 116:4599 (1994) and co-owned U.S. Patent Publication No. 2006/0222609), ubiquitin (Pilon et al., Biotechnol. Prog., 13:374-79 (1997), bovine prochymosin (Naught et al., Biotechnol. Bioengineer. 57:55-61 (1998), and bactericidal/permeability-increasing protein (“BPI”; Better, M. D. and Gavit, P D., U.S. Pat. No. 6,242,219). The art is replete with specific examples of this technology, see for example U.S. Pat. No. 6,613,548, describing fusion protein of proteinaceous tag and a soluble protein and subsequent purification from cell lysate; U.S. Pat. No. 6,037,145, teaching a tag that protects the expressed chimeric protein from a specific protease; U.S. Pat. No. 5,648,244, teaching the synthesis of a fusion protein having a tag and a cleavable linker for facile purification of the desired protein; and U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,215,896; 5,302,526; 5,330,902; and U.S. Patent Publication No. 2005/221444, describing fusion tags containing amino acid compositions specifically designed to increase insolubility of the chimeric protein or peptide.
Although the above methods are useful for the expression of fusion proteins, they often incorporate large inclusion body tags that decrease the potential yield of desired peptide of interest. This is particularly problematic in situations where the desired protein or peptide is small. In such situations it is advantageous to use a small inclusion body tag to maximize yield.
Shorter inclusion tags have recently been developed from the Zea mays zein protein (co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/641,936), the Daucus carota cystatin (co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/641,273), an amyloid-like hypothetical protein from Caenorhabditis elegans (co-owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/516,362), and tags comprising a n-sheet tape architecture (Aggeli et al., J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 125:9619-9628 (2003); Aggeli et al., PNAS, 98(21):11857-11862 (2001); Aggeli et al., Nature, 386:259-262 (1997); Aggeli et al., J. Mater Chem, 7(7):1135-1145 (1997); and co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/782,836. The use of short inclusion body tags increases the yield of the target peptide produced within the recombinant host cell.
Recovering the recombinantly produced peptide of interest from the fusion protein typically involves at least on cleavage step used to separate the peptide of interest from the inclusion body tag. Once cleaved, the peptide of interest is recovered from the mixture of peptide fragments. However, recovery of the peptide of interest is often difficult, especially when the inclusion body tag and the peptide of interest are similar in size and/or exhibit similar solubility characteristics.
The problem to be solved is to provide a cost effective process to separate the inclusion body tag from the peptide of interest.